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Middle Tennessee State Tailgate Wrap-Up:

      - Lot 1, College Park, MD 
 

Tailgate Quote:   

“I’d run too if you knew how much I’d been drinking today”

Anonymous Driver to J-walkers

Overall: 
 

Though technically not the first tailgate of the year, it certainly felt that way for me.  To illustrate my anticipation, I’ll tell you about my dreams.  I woke up on Saturday Morning at around 3:00 am, looked at the clock and then went back to sleep…kind of.  From that point on it was just one reoccurring dream after another about missing the tailgate.  In the first one, I had to work late and wasn’t able to leave the office until 1:00 pm.  On the second dream, my sister was supposed to pick me up and take me to the game, but her car broke down.  I tried catching a cab, but every cab I tried to get into someone beat me to it. 

Now like all dreams neither made much sense.  For one I work for the Government, I don’t go in on Saturdays!  For the cab dream there were like 30 cabs on the street of Denton that day.  I’m pretty sure I have never seen even 1 cab in all the time I’ve lived here.  So those other issues I’ll have to have someone else interpret, but the overall message was clear.  Not since Christmas 1983 (the year I was hoping for both Atari and the Millennium Falcon) have I been so restless.

And you know what?  The anticipation was justified.  There is nothing like pulling into Lot 1 at 9:30 (ish), setting up the table, cracking open a beer, and BSing with your friends.  It’s almost how I feel I’d live my life if I, nor they, never had to work again.  So it’s great to be back. 

Tailgate Highlights:

We are going to over lap here a little bit, but the tailgate highlight had to be our last flip cup game.  Some group of Amateur flip cuppers actually had to the guts to challenge us to flip cup.  I call them amateurs because for one they asked if they could borrow a table from us, and then asked if they could buy 6 solo cups.  I of course did not charge them for the flip cups (so what you want about me but I have no qualms about giving away other peoples stuff), but come on.  It’s a tailgate people, how do you not show up with a table or cups?  They’re like those people who ask to buy beer.  It’s like WHAT?!?  You just found out that there is drinking involved with tailgating…do tell.

But I’m digressing.  We gladly obliged and set things up.  We even changed out their crappy skinny bottom cups for the standard regulation solo cups (What?  You thought I’d give strangers our good cups!).  Then it was game on.  I wish I could say the level of dominance was VT Road Trip worthy (I wonder what that girl named Rain is up to now?) but it was enough.  Games 1 and 2 were won in rather easily, but that is where D7 hiccupped.  The next thing we knew we screwed around and lost games 3 and 4 to make it 2-2.  But then, like a WWE match, just when it looks like the good guy is going to falter, he does the miraculous comeback.  We cleared out games 5 and 6 and won it 4-2. 

I don’t want to make a habit of doing these challenges, after all we built this table for us and our friends to use, it isn’t a public court, but on occasion when it happens, it’s good to know we can hold our own.   

Tailgate Lowlights:

Again, back to flip cup.  During one of the flip cups we broke for a bathroom break in the middle of a series (3-1 at the time, WTF you can’t wait for one more game).  Anyway to kill time Pete decided to do a 2 vs. 2 flip cup match until everyone got back from the restroom.  But it wasn’t just a 2 vs. 2 match.  It was a 2 vs. 2 up and back match.  Pete and I took on J and Emily.  I forget what all happened (and can’t find it in my notes), but the series was tied 1 to 1, which brings us to our low light. 

Game three Bri…er uh Pete came out strong.  He one flipped and then watched me do my thing.  I then one flipped, refilled, and then one flipped again.  Great, right?  Well when you go back to back like that in 2 seconds and you don’t have time to let out that always refreshing burp, you start to feel like a pressure cooker about to explode.  I poured the beer down the hatch, flipped the cup, and realized I still had beer in my mouth and it wasn’t going to go down.  So I spit it up.  I know, it was embarrassing, it cost us a win, but for all my faults, I can say I knew when I’ve reached my limitation.  And that was one of those times. 

Now it wasn’t the end of my day.  In fact I was fine playing out the rest of the flip cup games once everyone got back, but just not being able to get that gas out before I poured another gulp was too much to handle.  I need a little more time than that, had I forced it the result would have been the same, except instead of beer being on Lot 1, it would have also been the entire contents of my belly!  That was a lowlight.  Please pause while I hang my head for 30 seconds. 

Punt, Pass, and Kick:

I’m happy to report we got a new PPK champion.  It isn’t anything against J, for the most part we all like him (I wrote it that way to try to get into his head that someone in the tailgate doesn’t like him, and now he’ll be spending all season trying to figure out who it is).  But we need to have a little variety on the trophy.  Pete was more than happy to supply it.  Pete had a career day at PPK going 42 spaces, which wins just about every time. 

When interviewed after the game, Pete credited his victory to thinking on several occasions of buying a football to practice.  Well you can’t argue with the results.  Congratulation to Pete who was smart enough to win at something that has a trophy that will now forever bear his name.  I can’t say the same for the next guy.   
 

Coffin Corner:

Coffin Corner is a great game.  And about 9 months ago I bought something to make it even greater.  Terp Football Pylons.  Now no more asking, is it the beer can that is the end zone or the pot hole.  Of course I forgot the pylons, so much for that.  But for CC there was good news and there was bad news.  First Jason went first and nailed a beauty which went out of bounds at about the 4.  If you know how coordinated the rest of us are, you know that that was the winning kick, literally 15 seconds into the competition.  The rest was practice.  So congratulations Jason.  I need to make a trophy for this event since it is becoming a regular event now.

Also, just an aside from CC, though not a highlight or a quote, still a story worth telling on one of these recaps.  After J kicked his punt which bounced backwards he blamed the parking lot, failing to consider that the parking lot is asphalt and slanting downhill, which if anything makes it virtually impossible for anything to bounce any other way.  But you are right J, it was the parking lots fault. 
 

Flip Cup Results:

And now the main event.  Or at least I’m assuming it is the main event after all the questions I get about this and all the people telling me what to write and not to write about.  With the return of the table this was also the first official flip cup action of the season.  I have to say, results were spotty.  Now we all had fun, and flip cup is always a success, but the reason I’m down on it is that there were no close matches.  No game 7’s, no trash talking, unless you count telling your team “The Bleeding stops here!”, or “Come on we can still win this” as trash talking.  In fact, if Vegas could take bets on Flip Cup, I think I could have picked every game before it even started.  But alas, they only take football bets, which I can’t pick nearly as well. 

The First Series:  As mentioned I’ll try to make these exciting, but it’s like giving Picasso a stick with a piece of dog dew on the end and asking him for a master piece.  I only have so much to work with.  Match one, or shall I say Mis-match 1 (you like how I did that?) featured the Terp Town Turn Around Tappers vs. Miss Mable’s Maryland Masher’s.  TTAT consisted of J, Bob, Jason, Justin, and Emily.  MMMM consisted of Meagen (the extra A is for angry, which she gets when you spell her name Megan), Pete, Matthew, Todd, and Troy.  Now normally I would be screwed here.  In my notes I keep track of who won each game so that you get the ebb and flow of the match, but this time I just tallied until someone reached 4.  Luckily it was 4-0 TTAT, so it didn’t really matter.  Like I said, these weren’t suspenseful.

The Second Series: This next match pretty much featured the same except I was traded (voluntarily mind you) for Matthew (it was a terrible trade by the way).  So team one was The Calvert County Cow Tippers, and team two was the Cecil County Farmer’s Daughters.  To recap CCCT had Emily, Justin, Jason, Matthew, and J.  CCFD had Bob, Troy, Todd, Meagan, and Brian.  This may have been one of the closest matches of the day.  CCCT went up 2-0 early, and then CCFD struck making it 2-1.  As vocal leader of CCFD, I tried to rally the troops yelling “They’re $%$# their britches now”.  No one listened.  CCCT rattled off 2 more easy wins to walk away with a 4-1 victory.  And the old adage about sticks and stones remained true.

The Third Series: At about this time we realized we hadn’t had much competition in these match ups. So we went the way of the school yard.  That’s right, Captains.  As we continue to get more and more cut throat, and as players who are worried about their record flock towards teams they know can win, I think this is going to become more of a standard way of picking teams.  Because we have no decision making abilities we just split the Leavitts in two and made them pick.  Team Young Leavitt was made up of Justin, Bob, Matthew, Troy, Andrew, and Phil.  Team Older Leavitt was made up of Jason, J, Brian, Emily, Meagan, and Colleen.  I’d like to say it was riveting and went down to the wire, but again it went 4-0, showing age does trump beauty.  (No offense to Jason who is quite striking, I just need to lash out at something).   

The Fourth Series:  Same.  Same Teams.  Same Results.  Same lack of suspense.  Ugh. The worst part of this is that I actually forgot about this series and thought I finished the day 2-2.  Not quite. 
 

The Final Show Down: Please see the Tailgate highlights.  I’m not typing all of that over again! 

Below are the season standings.  I’m not very happy, but I am only one man and I’m not afraid to be on a team that looks a little suspect while others wait until the last second to choose their side.   
 

The “Save the Terrapin (tailgaters)” Drive:

Not much to report here, but I did want to say, I took the 100$ we raised last year and put it towards the grill.  I figure we all use it, and I just wanted everyone to know where those funds went.  By all means feel free to bring whatever you please for the grill and if you are like Brian and I, have J make it for you.  We still have some more from 2 years ago, which I’ll use towards pumpkin carving prizes and so forth. 

Tailgate MVP:

You know what.  I’m going with Pete for this one.  Not only did Pete finally end J’s run at PPK, but in every situation he was in, he was trying to take the tailgate to the next level.  Isn’t that the textbook definition of what a Tailgate MVP should be?      

Honorable Mention (in no particular order): 

Just so you know, I’ve decided to only give out Honorable Mentions if someone really stood out, but not quite enough for the MVP.  This week I thought it was Brian and everyone else.  Not that you couldn’t make a case for everyone else as a HM, but if it isn’t obvious, I’ll just leave it be.     
 

Conclusion

The best thing about tailgating is that it happens before the game.  Therefore the debacle that was the MTSU game doesn’t have any affect on the Tailgate.  Overall and I say this every time, I had a lot of fun.  Lets face it, there are very few things that make you second guess going into a college football game.  And that is how I feel every week.  Luckily for tailgating, by October I just might be saying “Ah Screw it, let’s play flip cup again”.  But that isn’t good news for the season.  But I’m getting to the point where I’m looking to grab on to anything that’s good.  Next game is at 3:30 against Rutgers.  A good start time, and a great tailgate start time.  I hope to see everyone there.  Especially those who missed this past weekend.  You were all missed.

So until then, don’t forget:

·        Don’t challenge D7 to flip cup on our own table

·        The Bee’s are back!

·        J is no longer the PPK king

·        “Wo ist der bahnhoff?” means where is the train station

·        And the team might stink, but the beers in the parking lot will always be cold